The invention relates generally to digital data receivers.
The ever-increasing demand for high-speed wireless data transmission has posed great challenges for wireless system designers to achieve high-throughput wireless communications in radio channels with limited bandwidth. Multiple transmit and receive antennas are likely to be the dominant solution in future broadband wireless communication systems, as it has been shown that the capacity of such a multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) channel increases linearly with the minimum between the numbers of transmit and receive antennas in a rich-scattering environment, without a need for increasing the bandwidth or transmitted power. Because of the extremely high spectrum efficiency, MIMO techniques have been incorporated into several standards of various wireless applications, such as the IEEE 802.11a wireless LAN, the IEEE 802.16 wireless MAN, and the WCDMA standards.
A variety of MIMO receiver structures have been proposed in the art. A receiver structure utilizing maximum likelihood (ML) detection would be optimal, but has a complexity which grows exponentially in terms of the number of transmit antennas. Simpler detection schemes have been proposed based on nulling and interference cancellation (IC), such as the method of zero-forcing (ZF) nulling and IC with ordering, and minimum mean-squared error (MMSE) nulling and IC with ordering. See, e.g., P. W. Wolniansky et al., “V-BLAST: an Architecture for Realizing Very High Data Rates over the Rich-scattering Wireless Channel,” In Procedings of Int. Symp. Sig. Sys. Elect. (ISSSE) (September 1998); G. J. Foschini, “Layed Space-Time Architecture for Wireless Communication in a Fading Environment When Using Multi-element Antennas,” Bell Labs. Tech. J., 1(2), pp. 41-59 (1996); G. D. Golden et al., “Detection Algorithm and Initial Laboratory Results using V-BLAST Space-Time Communication Architecture,” Elect. Let., 35, pp. 14-16 (January 1999). Unfortunately, the performance of these simple detection strategies is significantly inferior to that of ML detection. Sphere decoding has been proposed as a near-optimal detection method, whose complexity is cubic in terms of the number of transmit antennas. See O. Damen et al., “Lattice Code Design For Space-Time Codes,” IEEE Commun. Let., 4(5), pp. 161-163 (May 2000). Detection schemes based on sphere decoding, however, are hard decision algorithms which suffer performance losses when concatenated with an outer channel decoder in coded MIMO systems. A detection scheme has been proposed that modifies sphere decoding to yield soft decision output—but at the expense of a significantly higher complexity.
In co-pending commonly-assigned U.S. Non-Provisional Utility patent application Ser. No. 10/631,991, entitled “NEAR-OPTIMAL MULTIPLE-INPUT MULTIPLE-OUTPUT (MIMO) CHANNEL DETECTION VIA SEQUENTIAL MONTE CARLO,” filed on Jul. 30, 2003, the contents of which are incorporated herein by reference, it has been shown that sequential Monte Carlo methods could be employed for demodulation in MIMO systems, achieving near optimal performance while maintaining low computational complexity. The detection approach disclosed therein, however, does become more computationally complex as the size of the modulation symbol constellation grows. Accordingly, it would be advantageous to improve the approach and achieve the same performance while further reducing the number of computations required.